A pretty interesting look into the reasoning behind Reddit Notes, the now defunct reddit cryptocurrency.
- Because humans have interests, and no two humans’ interests align perfectly, it is often the case that the interests of reddit, Inc. come into conflict with reddit, the users. Sometimes this means too much advertising, but more generally it’s that reddit, Inc. focuses a little more on converting content into money so they can pay their bills and give a return to their investors, and a little less on building better tools and giving a better experience for the users of reddit. And the users don’t get paid for their labor.
EDIT It looks like Ryan X. Charles is going full time into reddit decentralization: https://twitter.com/ryanxcharles/status/618866411973312512
When all you have is a hammer, the whole world is a nail. Server-side, Reddit is a pig. It consumes an undue amount of resources for what it does - if a thousand people look at one Craigslist page, Craigslist has to create and serve one page a thousand times. If a thousand people look at one Reddit page, Reddit has to create a thousand pages and serve them each once. That's the curse of vote rank. I am not a computer engineer. This may very well have been a clever way to leverage the problem. But as someone who debuted at #3 well-rounded when Karmawhores.com went live this: ...is pure bullshit. MrGrim figured out how to monetize content on Reddit a long-ass time ago. He created Imgur. "Good content" is easily-digestible images and this way lies funnyjunk, cheezburger, 9gag and all the other advertising-heavy content recyclers. More importantly, though, the "server costs" of Reddit are pretty meager. I did some back-of-the-envelope calcs and based on this, where Yishan says that $3.99 pays for 476 minutes of server time, Reddit's servers cost about $5k per year. They've got 58 employees at about $50-$75k per year (including benefits and such) and two executives and they're pulling down about $8m a year in ad revenue. Reddit's expenses are 3 orders of magnitude higher than anything a "decentralized Reddit" could have saved them.Furthermore, when a user upvotes content, that sends a small amount of bitcoin to the author of that content, thus incentivizing the production of good content
The 5k figure is just for one server, and it's 276 minutes instead of 476. > you’re helping to pay for one of our many hundreds of servers to run for 4.6 hours. Lower bound on "many hundreds" is probably around 300, meaning total costs are at least $2.2M, roughly at parity with your estimated payroll cost.
The problem is that by introducing a monetary system to vote/share content, you fundamentally change what made reddit successful in the first place: an environment where you can freely speak, regardless of how much other users approve. With the pay-to-vote system, it just quickly become a giant circle-jerk contest of who can say the thing to attract the most upvotes, and who has enough money to sponsor the content they want others to see. AKA big money advertising on the front page. Putting bitcoin as the centerpiece to reddit would kill it.
But with reddit, that's sort of the point. It's to see what the most popular thing is in each topic. What's popular, what's hot, what's new. When money gets involved, things get... weird. Things are done for profit, rather than creativity and entertainment. Some people don't care for karma in the current system, and just say what they think. Some want to get low karma just to see if they can. These will be ultimately eliminated with a money system in place. Dead subs will no longer be created unless the creator knows that people will go there. As I said, it'd be more circle-jerky than reddit is now.
I guess my fundamental question is what on Reddit is worth paying for? And I don't mean that as an insult to Reddit, but as a serious question. What 'content' is worth actual money on Reddit, and for content which is worth paying for, why is Reddit the place to pay for it when it's free elsewhere? They're essentially trying to monetize conversation and forum posts in a way that hasn't been done yet, but it doesn't 'click' with me yet.
People are heavily invested in the communities in the subreddits. You can get communities for free elsewhere, you can't get those specific ones. And let's not make this a discussion on the quality of the subreddits, the users obviously think they're worth spending a lot of time on.I guess my fundamental question is what on Reddit is worth paying for?